The girl in the hood.

My grandmother is gone, her life extinguished, and I can’t shake the unwavering belief that it is entirely my fault. It began with what seemed like a harmless decision—a moment of misplaced trust. I thought making friends with a wolf was a clever idea, a unique adventure for someone like me. Then, when he asked me questions, I not only answered but actually gave him directions to my grandmother’s house nestled deep within the forest. The wolf had tricked me, and I had walked blindly into his trap.

He devoured her. My sweet grandmother, my Granny, was eaten—consumed by that beast. And all because of me. She hadn’t deserved any of it. She was frail and ill, a tender, vulnerable woman who had lived her life removed from the chaos of the city.

Granny should have been safe. I was supposed to bring her bread, cake, and wine—the familiar little comforts she loved so much. Instead, I delivered doom to her doorstep. Granny had always been solitary, even after losing Grandpa and even as her son—my father—moved far away to the city for work.

Her little house in the woods had become her sanctuary, her world. She had lived there for as long as I could remember, but now that world has gone silent.

I stood frozen at her funeral, watching as the coffin disappeared behind the heavy curtains. It was final. No more Granny. The weight of it crushed me, a torment I couldn’t escape. All my fault.

That day could have claimed me too if it weren’t for the woodcutter. He arrived at just the right moment to intervene, rescuing me from the very jaws of death.

While I was saved, Granny could not be. His axe felled the wolf, but not before it had snuffed out her life… and begun to digest her. That thought alone froze my blood in terror. My savior could not rescue me from the guilt that followed me like an unshakable shadow.

Granny was already gone, and I couldn’t quiet the truth: it all stemmed back to my choices. Now both the wolf and Granny are no more, but I remain—alive with nothing but the cost of their deaths pressing down on my shoulders.

The bright red cloak Granny made for me, woven carefully by her loving hands, once felt like protection. Now it hangs on me heavily, its fabric cold like ice and jagged like thorns against my skin.

That beloved cloak gave me a name that everyone knows—a name Granny herself used so sweetly: Little Red Riding Hood. She would say it with fondness so often that soon the entire village forgot my real name altogether. Ruby Woods meant nothing to anyone but me anymore. To them, I was only ever “Red.”

My memories torment me in endless cycles. When I close my eyes at night, I see it again and again—the wolf’s large maw devouring my precious Granny while taunting me with words dripping with sinister glee: that it was all my fault. And maybe he’s right.

Maybe I was solely to blame. If only I had listened—if only I hadn’t strayed from the path like Mother and Father had warned me not to do! Their words echo faintly in my ears now, drowned by regret as I gaze at the small urn resting atop our mantlepiece—Granny reduced to ashes stored in a vessel that doesn’t at all represent the life she led.

My father plans to keep her there forever—a centerpiece of remembrance—but I know better. Granny wouldn’t want this. No, she would want freedom. She spent her entire life in those woods; it was where she belonged, not sealed away on a cold shelf above a fireplace.

I was just twelve years old when it happened—when I wandered off that path, when my childish naivety led her toward an unthinkable fate. The guilt has been a part of me ever since, an unwanted companion I’ve carried from childhood into adulthood, refusing to let go even as years have passed.

Sometimes I wonder if growing up was ever really meant for someone like me; all I wanted was to stay Granny’s little girl forever. Her urn remains on that same mantelpiece back home, even now that I’ve moved away and tried to build another life elsewhere.

But she’s still there somehow—always watching me with unsaid accusations hanging heavy in the air between us. A reminder of what I did. A reminder that she suffered because of me.

I didn’t even understand what had truly happened until I saw the wolf’s imitation of her—posing in her bed, draped in mockery of her kindness and love. He wanted to eat me too! His cruel grin beneath that fragile disguise still haunts me. When Mom tried to comfort me afterward, she explained that perhaps the wolf wasn’t right in the head, that he must have had “issues.” But what about me?

Everyday I feel this way and I cannot change it.

But this was only the beginning of it all.

After all I am the girl in the hood.